Natural History Collections as Inspiration for Technology

Abstract

Living organisms are the ultimate survivalists, having evolved phenotypes with unprecedented adaptability, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and versatility compared to human technology. To harness these properties, functional descriptions and design principles from all sources of biodiversity information must be collated − including the hundreds of thousands of possible survival features manifest in natural history museum collections, which represent 12% of total global biodiversity. This requires a consortium of expert biologists from a range of disciplines to convert the observations, data, and hypotheses into the language of engineering. We hope to unite multidisciplinary biologists and natural history museum scientists to maximize the coverage of observations, descriptions, and hypotheses relating to adaptation and function across biodiversity, to make it technologically useful. This is to be achieved by developments in meta‐ taxonomic classification, phylogenetics, systematics, biological materials research, structure and morphological characterizations, and ecological data gathering from the collections − the aim being to identify and catalogue features essential for good biomimetic design.

Biomimetics in Botanical Gardens—Educational Trails and Guided Tours

“…Botanical gardens, zoological gardens, and natural history museums are scientific collections, in addition to being places of education, teaching, and research [ 73 ]. Moreover, the collections in natural history museums contain millions of specimens representing 12% of total global biodiversity [ 74 ] and making species from remote areas or fossil records accessible to the general public [ 75 , 76 ]. Given the increasing loss of global biodiversity, collections will become even more important in the future.…”

“…The diversity of objects collected in natural history museums, encompassing most of nature, both animate and inanimate, and especially the living collections in botanical and zoological gardens offer tremendous opportunities for biomimetic research and hark back to the original function of collections: the use of natural resources. The wide range of adaptations to various environmental conditions, of design principles, and of material combinations from living nature represents an immense potential for biomimetic innovation in technology today and in the future [ 73 , 74 , 79 ].…”

Russian Biodiversity Collections: A Professional Opinion Survey

“…In countries where biocollections have been developed for a considerably long time (thirty-fifty years), large nation-wide biodiversity centres have appeared [33]. Figure 2 shows the number of documented biocollections and large biodiversity centres in several countries, which are significant for bioconservation, agriculture, medicine, veterinary, and scientific research [34][35][36].…”

The Epistemology of Biomimetics: The Role of Models and of Morphogenetic Principles

“…Such cases could even be seen as temporally stretched analogues to interdisciplinary cooperation, though the important aspect of bidirectional communication is missing. As Green et al (2019) point out, biomimicry practitioners, typically engineers, physical scientists, and chemical and biological engineers, may often profit from direct interaction with those more knowledgeable about the wealth of functions realized by biological traits, like biologists in natural history museums and collections. Certainly, this holds also for cooperations with physiologists and partners from many other biological disciplines.…”